Читать книгу The Sharp End of Life - Dierdre Wolownick - Страница 13

AT UCLA, CHARLIE WAS working on a master’s degree in teaching English as a second language, so I expanded my teaching credentials to include TESOL as well. We both taught classes there while we finished and had no trouble finding good jobs together at a university in Japan. The Japanese school year begins in the spring, so after our last fall teaching semester, we vacated our apartment in southern California, left our things with family and friends, and moved in with his parents, in Sacramento, for a couple of winter months.

But while we lived in their house, the house Charlie had grown up in, things changed. Or maybe they just changed back. I’ll never know.

“Charlie,” his mother asked in her sweet, innocent voice, as we all finished lunch in the kitchen, “where’s the cover to the peanut butter?”

“How would I know?”

His nasty tone made me look up quickly, from son to mother. I cringed, fearing a reaction. If I’d lashed out like that at home, in that tone of voice, my mother would have hit me. And I would have deserved it. But my mother-in-law didn’t react, and so neither did I.

The first time Charlie refused to acknowledge one of his father’s questions, I held my breath. If my brother had done that at home, some parent or aunt or uncle would have yelled at or slapped him, a reminder to answer your elders when they ask you a question. Charlie’s father repeated his question, something about the yard or the car. Charlie remained silent, reading something at the table where they both sat.

I had never seen anyone act so disrespectfully, especially to older people. Parents. I was dumbfounded. Sometimes, instead of refusing to answer, he would mumble his reply. When his parents asked him to repeat it, he got even nastier.

We lived there for two months. No one ever mentioned his frequent atrocious behavior toward them, or toward me. I said nothing, neither to them nor to him. This was their house, their rules, their family. Meanwhile, new cracks were spreading across our fine china.

I was sure that once we were alone together, once we had settled into our new life in Japan, things would get back to normal. I wasn’t sure yet what “normal” was, exactly, but this clearly wasn’t it.

Finally, in March, we squeezed into two airplane seats, wearing our hiking boots, heavy socks, and the many layers of clothes that were too bulky to fit in our two suitcases, and flew off to our new life on the other side of the world.

CHARLIE AND I HAD each lived abroad, so we expected the transition to be easy. But as soon I headed for the restroom after we deplaned at Tokyo Narita Airport, that sense of comfort started to fray. I might have been fluent in four languages—but I couldn’t tell which restroom to use. I had to wait for someone to come out, like a child who can’t read.

Two men from the university where we’d be teaching met us at the airport. They wore trench coats and bowed a lot, almost obsequiously. It seemed an uncomfortable exaggeration of our new prestige as foreign professors. As we stepped out of the terminal into the dark evening to walk to the bus, a sticky blanket of humid air wrapped itself around us, oozing inside our too-heavy clothes and making it hard to breathe. I was accustomed to humidity in New York, but Charlie, used to the aridity of the Central Valley, hated it.

All the dark gray concrete buildings around us were streaked even darker by rain. Once inside the bus, our welcoming party led us all the way to the back. The farther we walked, the lower the ceiling became, until Charlie and I were hunched deep into the collars of our coats. We all sat against the back window. Sweat trickled down my neck. It was going to be a long ride. Once the bus started rolling, people began lighting cigarettes. A really long ride. As the bus veered sharply onto the two-lane highway, I hoped I wouldn’t throw up and embarrass us both.

I hoped Charlie wouldn’t, either. He hated smoke.

As it turned out, he hated lots of things. The rain. Twenty-eight days out of thirty, our first month there. Even for me, that was a lot of rain. For him, it was an emotional hardship. As were all the rules. Whenever I’d mentioned politics or philosophy in California, he’d say he was a nihilist or an anarchist. I usually laughed it off, assuming he was being outrageous for effect. But now I began to wonder . . . the rigors of the strictly hierarchical Japanese society seemed to gnaw at his sense of individualism. He made fun of the gestures people used as they talked. Of everything. When we learned that there were no street names and that addresses were meaningless, merely chronological, he was irate: “How could anybody run a country without knowing where anything is?!”

From the beginning, I attributed a lot of that malaise to the physical aspect of our life there. We were just too big for Japan. We couldn’t see out of the low windows in the subway to know which station we were at unless we bent over. We also had to bend way over to use the tiny washing machine in our apartment or even to do the dishes. Our backs always hurt. And Charlie was taller than me.

That had to weigh on his psyche as well as on his body, I told myself. Why else would he be so unhappy? This was our first big adventure together. We had chosen this. I was having a grand time, learning fascinating things every day. But he didn’t seem to like what he was learning.

At the beginning, we both signed up for the Japanese lessons offered by the university for all foreign experts, as they called us. I went at the beginning, but it was too basic for me. I acquire languages easily, and was learning fast just by living there and talking with people. Charlie went for a while. He never talked about what they did in class, but after a month or so, he stopped going. Eventually, if anyone asked how his Japanese was coming along, he would pat my arm and say with a wry smile, “She can do my talking for me.”

Trouble was, in Japan, the man speaks for the family. Mr. Honnold’s presence and voice were required when dealing with any issues or questions about our apartment, parking space, or insurance—all of which came up that year. Not Mrs. Honnold’s.

The unfairness of that requirement just made him angrier.